Blogs

Why get Certifications? Customer satisfaction - Sixty-six percent of managers believe that certifications improve the level of service and support offered to customers. Revenue results - “Financially successful companies typically invest more in certifying their internal technical team.” Cushing Anderson, Vice President, IDC’s IT Education and Certification research. Project outcomes - High-level performance is achieved when 40% to 55% of a team are Microsoft Certified Professionals. Things that make getting a certification easier You can take advantage of partner-exclusive, training and certification offers available through Partner Skills Plus. These offers can benefit you by enabling you to become certified more quickly and do so at a savings. Here are some of the things I saw: Second Shot - pay for one exam at full price and get two chances to pass. Offer ends 30 th June 2008. IW Skills Accelerator – helping partners get skilled on the Office 2007 technologies. Offer ends 31 st July 2008. Start saving now...

Remember that BI starts with data in Excel and then includes SQL and builds from there. One of the nice things is that BI is now accessible to any business that wants to analyse their business. Now all that is needed is the understanding of what questions do I want to ask and what data do I have that can help me!! Microsoft Gets Gartner's Business Intelligence Top Ranking The company makes a surprise leap ahead of Business Objects and Cognos in its ability to execute on BI products and pricing. Business Objects and Cognos have long been considered the leaders in business intelligence platforms. But in a surprising new report, Gartner ranks Microsoft ahead of those companies in its ability to execute. Gartner's "magic quadrants" are typically annual market evaluations that place software vendors in one of four quadrants within a square: niche players, visionaries, challengers, and leaders. Specific placement within a quadrant depends on a vendor's ability to execute, which moves them upward...

Well, it had to happen - another way to keep track of everyone and see what is going on in the world out there. I've joined Twitter as UKSBSGUY - Twitter / davidoverton . Always keen to learn more and get more feedback!! = was twiter/uksbsguy, but I have updated it to reflect the change to davidoverton.com See you "out there" or "out here" soon David Technorati Tags: Twitter

If you have looked at the information on setup and install at SBS 2008 Install process (in pictures) and wanted more information then these presentations will be of extreme use to you. They cover both SBS 2008 and EBS 2008. I particularly liked the setup and migration and messaging sessions. SBS 2008 product related sessions SBS 2008 Overview SBS 2008 Setup and Migration Networking Setup and Getting Started Tasks Administration and Management Networking Messaging Storage Management - Backup, Restore, and Server Storage Health and Monitoring Client Experience EBS 2008 product sessions Essential Business Server Overview Installation and Migration Administration and Management Security and Messaging Implementation Differences (between EBS 2008 and SBS 2008) If you want to see more of the information on SBS 2008 , click the link on the left ttfn David Technorati Tags: Microsoft , SBS 2008 , EBS 2008 , Small Busines Server , SBS , Essential Business Servers , Event , SMB Summit , Partner , Community , Small Business...

If you have have Office 2007 or a Windows Vista or Windows Desktop Search (WDS) then you probably have V2.6 or V3 of this fantastic search product. Version 4 has a wealth of updates, but most importantly, is more stable and faster. One of the things I love about this is that if you put this on a client and server, and then search a network share, if the contents are indexed on the server then WDS uses the remote index to search, making it super fast. It can even be used with SBS 2003 / 2008 to speed up access to the shares there too. Description of Windows Search 4.0 and the Multilingual User Interface Pack for Windows Search 4.0 Windows Search 4.0 Windows Search 4.0 lets you perform an instant search of your computer. Windows Search 4.0 helps you find and preview documents, e-mail messages, music files, photos, and other items on the computer. The search engine in Windows Search 4.0 is a Microsoft Windows service that is also used by programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Office OneNote...

  and  This weekend I finally got to see Star Wars The Clone Wars and while my Star Wars sensibilities were offended for the 1st 5 minutes (the voices are different and my eyes had to get used to the new visuals), but once I had done so both Molly and I really enjoyed the film. If you like simple fun, then you should also look at the Clones Vs Droids Game at http://www.clonesvdroids.com/ .  It is very simple, move your troops around, plan your shots and then see if your shots work, assuming your opponent moves too.  I have to say it took a few goes to master when playing against real opponents as first they moved than I had expected and then they actually jumped onto my “side” – something I was not prepared for!  Have a go, it is fun!     Finally, on my Star Wars-tastic adventure there is Robot Chicken.  This short DVD is based on the former works of Robot Chicken – the stop motion animation group take their normal themes and apply them to Star Wars.  I really, really...

Once I had built my Hyper-V Server I still had a few to resolve.  I thought I had better document the solutions I found to my 3 disk related problems from this entry . So the 3 issues covered are: How to get an existing disk to be available inside Hyper-V How to install RAID Management tools How to shrink a non-Dynamic VHD How to get an existing disk to be available inside Hyper-V (called a pass-through disk) Just to give you some background, I was moving a non-VM OS inside a Hyper-V system.  I had created the VM, but I could not get it to just “boot” from the old boot disk – the disk was not showing.  I’d read that this type of disk was a pass-through (or pass-thru) disk, but I could not find out how to configure it easily.  The solution turned out to be very simple.  Run DISKPART on the Hyper-V server, identify the disk and mark it offline.  It would then appear in the list of disks that could be installed.  What is more, if I ran out of disks I could install a SCSI controller...

I LOVE using Windows 7. I keep on going “oh, that’s nice” when I discover things, so what are my top LOVE’s: Speed – it runs much, much better on my laptop and does NOT keep the hard disk chattering Thumbnails – when you hover over a thumbnail it hides all the other windows and shows you that one on the screen IE tabs shown as thumbnails. I use IE tabs a lot and sometimes finding the right tab is hard. In Windows 7 I can flick through the thumbnails in the task pane and it flips through the tabs Jump lists – you now get a recently used list for any application – so Excel just shows the Excel recently used files, Word the word documents and so on. The are available by the program icons, but also if you right click on the program on the task bar Opening another copy of the program – hold shift and click on the icon in the task bar and another instance is spawned Fixing icons onto the task bar – now if there is a program you always start, fix it to the task...

[updated with correct URL] I saw this and thought I should pass it on. Microsoft Partner Network 2009 will explore strategies that enable you to continue to meet customers' needs and exploit new opportunities. Designed for Partner executives and sales leads, this event follows on from the Worldwide Partner Conference in July and provides more details of our UK execution plans. Join us for: - Insights from Microsoft executives as they share the Microsoft vision and strategies together with business growth opportunities and product innovation - A range of Partner-to-Partner online and offline networking opportunities, plus strategic and practical guidance on how to collaborate successfully with other Microsoft Partners - Market insights and guidance on developing customer opportunities - Useful resources to help you sell, market and deploy Microsoft technology, particularly when you find yourself in competitive technology situations - A glimpse into future industry trends and innovation, with exciting demonstrations...

I recently fell of the back of a boat which resulted in my faithful Samsung Omnia being written off.  Since this was a personal phone, I decided to upgrade to a Nokia Lumia 800 as it looked like a fab phone.  I have so far not been disappointed, however I hit two problems. The first was that my SIM was not a micro-sim. I contacted Virgin who told me they were very soon to launch a micro-sim, but not yet.  I bought a 30-day sim from Vodafone in the short term, but then discovered that I could trim the current SIM to fit by following the detailed instructions at http://www.solutios.com/simcutting/ .  All has been happy until my wife asked about sending MMS pictures from her phone.  When I tried to do it from mine, I discovered that it kept on failing with an error and asking me to try again.  This has been the second challenge that I have had with the phone! Searching the web found many frustrated people, some who had resorted to resetting their phones to factory defaults to get things...

Hi, so one of the often asked questions is "How do I take my business to market without spending a huge amount". While I don't have all the answers, this question is often asked and I have seen answers on both www.bCentral.co.uk - THE UK destination for Small Businesses, but I also saw this article on the US MS site - http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/resources/marketing/customer_service_acquisition/10_low_cost_ways_to_market_your_business.mspx?xid=c0007 - it has the top ten tips that we recommendations and by simply going through the guide and asking your customer "Would you consider doing this", you can start to get the grey matter going. In fact though, don't ask the question above, ask this one - it becomes easier to clear the fog around the benefit of technology "What would be the impact on your business if you did X?" - and try to get that impact down to a financial statement - this is your budget :-) Of note, the Marketing pages on bCentral are not all about product and can be found at http://www.bcentral...

Hi guys - I managed to fill the fringe meeting room and then some today with this discussion. The workshop seemed to be a success and discussed the several forms of security peope need to worry about, from remembering to test backups to getting a quality partner to work with. The slides are available in PDF format (one of the output formats from 2007 Microsoft Office system) :-) http://uksbsguy.com/files/12/fsb_event/entry190.aspx to download the file. ttfn David